Assamese becomes 10th language in India's flagship AI initiative

The Nanda Talukdar Foundation (NTF) has successfully integrated Assamese into BharatGen, India's sovereign artificial intelligence programme, making it the tenth Indian language supported by the government's ambitious digital initiative.

The historic partnership was formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding signed between NTF and BharatGen at IIT Bombay. Mrinal Talukdar, Secretary of NTF, and Kiran Shesh, CEO of BharatGen, executed the agreement with Dr Narayan Sharma of the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust present as witness.

BharatGen, launched by the Government of India in June 2025, represents the world's first government-funded multimodal large language model initiative. Led by IIT Bombay alongside a consortium of premier Indian institutions, the programme aims to create AI agents fluent in all 22 scheduled Indian languages while maintaining cultural authenticity and linguistic sovereignty.

The foundation's contribution of two million digitised Assamese pages marks a watershed moment for a language previously categorised as "low-resource" in digital applications. This massive corpus now positions Assamese alongside Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada in India's AI ecosystem.

"This is not just about technology—it is about ensuring Assamese has a future in the digital century. With BharatGen, we are placing Assamese shoulder to shoulder with the world's major languages," Dr Narayan Sharma emphasised during the signing ceremony.

The digital treasure trove stems from "Digitizing Assam," an extraordinary community-driven project that has transformed how cultural preservation operates in the digital age. Over 40 months, volunteers, students, and cultural institutions collaborated to digitise books, journals, manuscripts, and ancient Xasipaats, creating one of India's largest citizen-led preservation initiatives.

Kiran Shesh highlighted the broader implications: "BharatGen is about building an AI ecosystem that reflects India's diversity. Partnering with NTF and bringing Assamese into the fold is historic—it ensures that this rich language and culture are represented in the digital future we are creating."

The initiative demonstrates how grassroots efforts can scale to national significance. What began as a modest preservation project under the Nanda Talukdar Foundation evolved into a movement that attracted financial and institutional backing from the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust.

For India's fifth-largest economy, BharatGen represents both technological advancement and strategic positioning in global AI competition. The program's open-source approach ensures accessibility while maintaining indigenous control over language models that understand Indian cultural contexts.

The integration places Assamese literature, from classical texts to contemporary works, within reach of artificial intelligence applications that can generate, translate, and engage in sophisticated dialogue. This development promises to accelerate digital adoption in Assam while preserving linguistic heritage for future generations.